Background and Context
This maxim was collected April 8, 2020, and touched again exactly two years later, April 8, 2022 — no note explains the coincidence, but the file reads as revisited rather than merely re-saved. Unlike the tighter, aphoristic entries elsewhere in this folder, it's a small craft essay: four named, numbered rules with worked explanations, not a single compressed line. It sits inside the instructional-design maxims Mike built from direct practice, but it borrows its frame from a different discipline entirely — journalism — and states outright that the borrowing is deliberate: a professional technique imported wholesale because it "goes over very well" in a genre it wasn't designed for.
Interpretation
The maxim's opening move is a genre triangulation: news style is defined not on its own terms but against two alternatives — "an academic paper" and "an informal letter." That triangulation does real work. The academic paper is the register of exhaustive justification, where conclusions arrive only after the evidence supporting them; the informal letter is the register of association, where structure follows the writer's train of thought rather than the reader's need. News style, in Mike's telling, rejects both: not the academic paper's patience, and not the letter's meander, but a third thing built around a reader who is neither a captive student nor an intimate correspondent — a reader who is, in his own word, going to skip.
Rule one names the mechanism directly: the inverted pyramid, journalism's actual term for structuring a story with its conclusion first and its supporting detail trailing off in descending importance, so a reader (or, in a newsroom, an editor cutting for space) can stop reading at any point and still have gotten the essential fact. Mike's adaptation is precise about why this transfers to training: not because training writers face a space-cutting editor, but because "most of your readers just skip to the checklist" — the same terminal behavior the inverted pyramid was built to survive, arrived at independently in a different medium. This is the rule doing the most conceptual lifting; the other three are less a structure than a set of enforcement mechanics for it.
Rule two, fact, not opinion, is where the maxim quietly departs from pure journalism and re-enters instructional design. A newsroom's version of this rule is about verifiable events; Mike's version is about justification: "cite your sources or (at least) explain why something is a best practice." The parenthetical "at least" matters — it concedes that training material routinely asserts things (do it this way, follow this procedure) that aren't citable facts in the reporter's sense, and it sets the actual bar not at footnoted proof but at shown reasoning. An instruction without a citation and without a rationale is, by this rule, indistinguishable from a bare opinion dressed as policy — and the maxim treats that as the failure to avoid, not the absence of a citation itself.
Rules three and four, short and headlines make it visual, are the maxim's typographic layer, and they share a single underlying claim: that structure is itself a form of communication, separate from content. A paragraph's length and a header's presence tell a skimming reader something before they've read a word of either — this is short enough to be one idea, this is important enough to be named. Notably, the file that states these rules obeys them: short numbered paragraphs, a lead sentence per rule, no buried qualifications. The maxim is, in its own small way, a demonstration of the technique it describes.
Current Relevance
The maxim's underlying bet — that readers skim, and material should be built for skimming rather than against it — has only been vindicated by everything that has happened to reading behavior since 2020. Eye-tracking research on how people read on screens (the Nielsen Norman Group's F-shaped and layer-cake scanning patterns, first documented well before this maxim but repeatedly reconfirmed since) shows exactly the terminal behavior Mike names: readers hit a wall of unbroken text and disengage, hunting instead for the next bolded term or header to anchor on. The corporate shift toward microlearning — short, single-objective training modules built to be consumed in minutes rather than hours — is the inverted pyramid's logic applied at the level of an entire curriculum, not just a paragraph: lead with the one thing a learner needs, and let anything beyond that be optional depth rather than mandatory reading. Where a 2020 training deck might have run twenty slides building toward a conclusion, a 2026-era module is more likely to open with the takeaway, offer the reasoning as an optional expandable, and measure completion in minutes rather than sittings — the exact inversion rule one describes, now built into the authoring tools themselves rather than left to an individual writer's discipline.
Generative AI drafting tools sharpen the stakes on rule two specifically. It is now trivial to produce a training document that states a procedure with total confidence and zero justification — fluent, well-formatted, and citation-free — because a model can generate plausible-sounding best-practice language without ever having verified it against a real source. Mike's parenthetical "at least explain why" reads, unintentionally, as a pre-emptive answer to exactly that failure mode: a rule that a reviewer can actually apply to AI-assisted drafts, checking not for polish but for the presence of a stated reason, rather than trusting fluency as a proxy for accuracy. The maxim's other half — short paragraphs, visible headers — has become close to a platform default: most modern LMS authoring tools and knowledge-base platforms actively format content into these units whether or not the author intends it, which has quietly turned a stylistic choice from 2020 into something closer to an unavoidable convention by 2026. That shift cuts both ways — it makes rules three and four nearly automatic, but it also means the discipline they used to require has migrated from the writer's judgment into a template default, which can be followed formally (short blocks, visible headers) while still failing rule two underneath, since no formatting convention can force a writer to actually justify a claim.
Impact and Legacy
As a private craft note, this maxim's legacy runs entirely through Mike's own instructional-design practice and the small folder of maxims that sits beside it — it was never submitted for outside circulation, and there's no evidence it traveled past the training materials it was built to improve. Read against its neighbors, it functions as the how to the why stated more bluntly elsewhere in the folder: "Mike's First Rule" demands correctness at the sentence level, "Mike on Courseware Design" demands that talk and strategy convert into an actual built course, and this maxim supplies the structural discipline that makes a built course usable once it exists. Its influence is local and practical rather than public — a working style guide of one, applied consistently enough across a career that it was worth writing down and revisiting two years later. The two-years-to-the-day gap between the file's creation and its last edit is itself a small piece of evidence for how this maxim actually functioned in practice: not a note written once and filed away, but a standard Mike returned to and, presumably, checked his own subsequent work against — the closest thing this folder has to a maxim that was field-tested rather than merely stated. Set beside the folder's more diagnostic entries — "Mike on Incompetence," "Mike on the Pharisees of Education" — this one stands out as constructive rather than critical: a positive method for producing training material well, not a complaint about material produced badly, which gives it a different kind of durability inside his personal canon.
Contrasting Views or Controversies
The inverted pyramid is not uncontested even inside journalism, the discipline it's borrowed from. Narrative and feature writing — long-form magazine journalism, investigative pieces built around scene and reveal — deliberately reject front-loaded conclusions in favor of earned payoff, on the theory that some material rewards patience a skimming structure would destroy. Applied without discrimination to training, rule one risks flattening genuinely sequential content: a safety procedure, a multi-step technical process, or a compliance workflow often needs to be read and followed in order, and "put the most important thing first" can actively mislead a learner who then treats step four as optional context rather than a required step reached only after steps one through three.
Rule two's "fact, not opinion" carries its own quiet tension. Expert judgment in a field frequently is opinion — a seasoned practitioner's calibrated instinct, not yet reducible to a citable source or a fully articulable rationale — and a rule that requires either a citation or a stated reason can pressure a writer to manufacture a plausible-sounding justification for what is really earned intuition, producing false rigor rather than real transparency. The rule's own "at least" clause anticipates this gap but doesn't resolve it: an invented-sounding rationale satisfies the letter of the rule while failing its spirit just as thoroughly as an uncited opinion would.
Rules three and four carry a subtler risk together: a document optimized for scanning can train readers out of sustained attention, rewarding the skim it was built to survive rather than merely accommodating it. Short paragraphs and heavy headering can fragment genuinely interconnected reasoning into disconnected bullet-sized chunks, flattering the reader who only wants the checklist while shortchanging the reader who needed to understand why the checklist is shaped the way it is — the same tension "fact, not opinion" is meant to resolve, reappearing one level up, in whether the document's form still leaves room for the reasoning its content claims to supply.
Practical Application
- Individual (training writer): Draft the checklist or takeaway first, then write backward into the supporting explanation — don't build the case and hope the reader stays for the conclusion, since rule one predicts, correctly, that most won't. Keep a visible "so what" line at the top of every document as a discipline check: if it's missing, the draft is still in academic-paper mode.
- Individual (reviewer/editor): When reviewing a colleague's material, apply rule two literally: for every instructional claim, ask "is there a citation here, or at least a stated reason?" — and treat a confident, uncited assertion (AI-drafted or not) as an open finding, not a pass. Don't let polished formatting under rules three and four stand in for that check; a well-headered document can still be making things up underneath.
- Organizational (learning teams): Build a formatting standard around rules three and four — a hard paragraph-length ceiling and a header-per-idea convention — into the authoring template itself, so the discipline doesn't depend on any one writer remembering it under deadline. Pair it with a lightweight rule-two audit at review time, since a template enforces shape but not justification.
- Organizational (procedural/compliance content): Explicitly exempt genuinely sequential material from rule one's front-loading logic; mark step-by-step procedures as ordered and say so, rather than applying inverted-pyramid instincts to content where step four really does depend on step one having been completed first.
- Organizational (AI-assisted authoring): Treat an AI-drafted training document as satisfying rules three and four almost automatically, and rule two not at all by default — run the same "cite it or explain it" check on machine-drafted content that a human draft would get, since fluent formatting is not evidence of a verified claim.
- Civic/professional (any public-facing explainer): The same four rules generalize past training — a public health notice, a policy explainer, an onboarding email all compete for a reader who is deciding, within seconds, whether to keep reading; lead with the outcome, justify the claim, keep it short, and make the structure visible before assuming anyone will read the whole thing.
Background on the Author
Mike Hower's collected maxims read as field notes from a career built inside instructional design, and this entry shows a habit the others in the folder only imply: deliberately importing a technique from outside the field rather than deriving every rule from instructional theory alone. Naming the inverted pyramid by its actual journalistic term, rather than reinventing a private label for the same idea, suggests a working practitioner who reads and borrows across disciplines when a neighboring craft has already solved a problem he recognizes — the same generalist instinct visible in "Mike on Being an Expert Generalist" elsewhere in this collection. That the file was returned to and re-touched exactly two years after it was first collected is consistent with a maxim treated as a living style guide rather than a one-time note: revisited, presumably, against the accumulating evidence of what actually worked in the training materials he kept writing. The rules themselves read as drawn from the specific friction of writing for an audience that didn't choose to be there — an employee working through mandatory training, not a subscriber who sought out the content — which is a harder writing problem than either journalism or academia solves on its own, and one this maxim's cross-disciplinary borrowing was built to answer.